Pidgins and Pidgins and creolescreoles

---Presented by 吴瑜 （ MA03)

There are more than 100 Pidgins and creoles in the history all over the world.

What are Pidgin languages? A pidgin is a system of

communication which has grown up among people who do not share a common language, but who want to talk to each other, for trading or other reasons.

Pidgins have a limited vocabulary, a reduced grammatical structure, and a much narrower range of functions.

They are the native language of no-one, but they are nonetheless a main means of communication for millions of people, and a major focus of interest to those who study the way languages change.

Possible origins of the word pidgin All of the following have been suggested as

sources for the word pidgin, which is first attested in print in 1850:

A Chinese mispronunciation of the English word business.

The Portuguese word ocupacao (business). The Hebrew word pidjom (barter). A Yayo word pidians meaning people. Portuguese pequeno (little, child)—cf. ‘baby

talk’. English pigeon—suitable for carrying simple

messages.

Misunderstandings on pidgins:

The stereotype of a pidgin language is in children’s comics and films.

e.g. ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ A pidgin is a language which has broken

down. A pidgin is the result of baby talk,

laziness, corruption, primitive thought process, or mental deficiency.

Pidgin is a language with its own structure, grammar and vocabularies.

The fortune of Pidgins Because of their limited function, pidgin languages

usually do not last for very long —sometimes for only a few years, and rarely for more than a century. They die when the original reason for communication diminishes or disappears, as communities move apart, or one community learns the language of another. (Alternatively, the pidgin may develop into a creole. )

E.g. The pidgin French which was used in Vietnam all

but disappear when the French left; similarly, the pidgin English which appeared during the American Vietnam campaign virtually disappeared as soon as the war was over.

But there are exceptions. In Papua New Guinea, the local pidgin (Tok Pisin) is the most widely used language in the country.

On book cover An extract form a

glossary of political terms listed in a Tok Pisin booklet on government and independence.

GAVMAN

NA

INDEPEN

DENS

In newspaper

In literature--Shakespeare in Pidgin Julius Caesar(Act 3, Scene

2)Friends, Romans,

countrymen, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar.

Tok Pisin Pren, man bolong Tom,

Wantok, harim nau. Mi kam tasol long plantim Kaesar. Mi noken beiten longen. Sopos sampela wok bolong wampela man I stret; sampela I no stret; na man I dai; ol I wallis long wok I no stret tasol. Gutpela wok bolonged I slip; I lus nating long giraun wantaim long Kalopa. Fesin bolong yumi man. Maski Kaesar tu, gutpela wok I slip.

Creole languages A creole is a pidgin language which has become

the mother tone of community—a definition which emphasizes that pidgins and creoles are two stages in a single process of linguistic development.

First, within a community, increasing numbers of people begin to use pidgin as their principal means of communication.

As a consequence, their children hear it more than any other language, and gradually it takes on the status of a mother tongue for them. Within a generation or two, native language use becomes consolidated and widespread. The result is a creole, or ‘creolized’ language.

From pidgin to creole ---- Step by step The switch from pidgin to creole involves a major

expansion in the structural linguistic resources available– especially in vocabulary, grammar, and style, which have to cope with the everyday demands made upon a mother tongue by its speakers.

Reasons: Pidgins are by their nature auxiliary languages,

learned alongside vernacular languages which are much more developed in structure and use.

Creoles, by contrast, are vernaculars in their own right.

Where do pidgins and creoles come from? One view —many sources? Every creole is a unique, independent

development, the product of a fortuitous contact between two languages.

for: It is unlikely that a pidgin in South-east Asia should have anything in common with those developed in the Caribbean.

against: Common features such as the reduction of noun and pronoun inflections, the use of particles to replace tenses, and the use of repeated forms to intensify adjectives and adverbs are too great to be the result of coincidence. How could uniformity come from such diversity?

Another view—one source?

The similarities between the world’s pidgins and creoles can be explained only by postulating that they had a common origin.

for: Every English-based pidgin and creole

has a few Portuguese word, such as savi ‘know’, pikin ‘child’, and palava ‘trouble’.

Early accounts of Chinese pidgin refer to a mixed dialect of English and Portuguese.

Values of Pidgins and Creoles Today, the study of

creole languages, and of the pidgins which give rise to them, attracts considerable interest among linguists and social historians.

To the former, the cycle of linguistic reduction and expansion which they demonstrate, within such a short time-scale, provides fascinating evidence of the nature of language change. To the latter, their development is seen to reflect the process of exploration, trade, and conquest which has played such a major part in European history over the past 400 yeas.

Meanwhile, other forms of simplified speech have been noted, such as that used by children, in telegrams and headlines, and in talking to foreigners.

It is possible that the processes underlying pidgins and creoles reflect certain basic preferences in human language (such as fixed word order, or the avoidance of inflections). On this point, these languages provide fresh and intriguing evidence in the search for linguistic universals.

Evidence for language universals

The End